I agree that the most likely candidate would be hearing (or should be hearing), and while I don’t think the dog is emitting a click of any kind, to a dog’s ears there’s always an ambient sound of any given place (in fact every place on earth is bathed with a sound wave generated by surf crashing against the coast and homing pigeons are now thought to hone in on this since every spot on earth has its own unique signature) not to mention that anything in motion is making a sound. But I have seen some things with dogs that defy normal senses, such as knowing a raccoon was in a yard from inside a closed up house and rousing the dog from sleep to boot, I’ve seen ravens fly through dense thickets at full speed and it’s hard to believe they were neurologically processing stimuli-and-then-response. In this dog’s case the most Likely candidate for a super sensory capacity would be the nose and its recently documented quantum dimension, and then coupled to the fact that the heart generates a very strong electromagnetic field. I would venture therefore that a quantum entanglement between the external and the internal can occur via the nose and then picked up by the heart, thus the relationship between the insides and the outsides is happening faster than the speed of light, and thus the dog can feel what’s going on around it, it can feel the electromagnetic fields, perhaps even gravitational distortions, of everything in its surroundings. Of course all animals have this capacity but when active in the world, it is consumed by the experience of resistance and this subtle faculty is overridden by the regular senses and Central Nervous System manner of processing. The work of nature is to evolve by animals physically acting on the world, rather than just sitting around and being all knowing, so the CNS has to be mollified with explicit physical outlet of its nerve energy. Because this dog is blind, she has no option but to maintain her subliminal focus on the quantum aspects of her body/mind–i.e. the heart (which is probably why she is so happy). At any rate, I’m looking forward to what the Purdue team is able to identify.

(PS: Another more mundane possibility might be a vestige of a heat sensor so that dog gets infrared impression of its surroundings. Wish I could hang out with the dog, but from watching her hop in car and slide under fence, it seems that she just knows where things are without even having to direct her body in any particular way so as to focus in on something.)

I’m curious as to why the dog’s eyes were surgically removed while it was a puppy. If its brain were already wired with receptors for sight, would this have a different outcome than a dog that, for argument’s sake, was blind before birth?

I haven’t been able to find out anything as to why the dog’s eyes were removed, and that’s an intriguing question about being blind before birth. I’m looking forward to the Purdue results because presumably they are going to address this question, if not, you’ll have to bug them.

I saw this one a while back and was so fascinated by it, especially Chica’s fearlessness and lack of hesitation. (Her eyes would only have been removed if they were diseased, so I’m guessing her brain was not wired for sight.) I loved the ending comment that she sees by heart, it was so NDTish. That she focuses her attention internally, on the quantum aspects, seems to me to be a most logical and reasonable explanation of her dexterity. Such a lovely video to enjoy, no mental processing required!

The brain’s plasticity is so often referred to these days in cases where some core function is lost yet neural pathways remap. I have to wonder (and think it likely) if this remapping also occurs in the enteric nervous system and in other sensory receptor areas. If so they may all play a role in such things as increased auditory acuity or increased perception of magnetic fields or gravity fluctuations etc… It is funny how we think that if we’re not thinking about perceiving that we must not actually be perceiving (quantum aspects of scent a prime example). The more these things are studied the more we find out what actually goes on outside of cognition in the “background.”